Taking an approach to marketing funnel design that focuses on your audience and where they invest their attention, and building funnel stages that work together to capture that attention will ensure you get the most out of your efforts to build a funnel that converts. Follow these tips to build and refine your own digital marketing funnel.
Cross promoting is a tactic that sits at the foundation of content marketing strategies. It involves distributing a piece of content across other marketing channels to maximize exposure for the content, and ROI for the time and resources invested in creating it.
Blog Post Cross Promotion Example
For example, if you create a blog post, you can cross promote it by sharing it on your social media channels, including it in email newsletters, linking it in your website’s landing pages and in other blog posts, and including it as a reference in white papers.
Aside from maximizing ROI for the content, cross promotion also plays a critical role in linking together different stages of a digital marketing funnel. In the blog post example shared above, that blog post is serving as a mechanism to take people from the brand’s social media channels (top of funnel), and driving them to the brand’s website where they can engage with middle of funnel content like landing pages and email contact forms.
Website Landing Page Example
Website landing pages can be cross promoted in a similar way. Creating a social media campaign around a website landing page where you share links to it across your social channels accompanied by images, videos, and fresh copy will drive potential leads to that web page. When a social media lead then fills out the contact form on the website landing page, they can be enrolled in an email drip campaign that delivers them a series of emails containing links to educational blog posts, videos, and whitepapers all designed to move them further down the funnel.
In this example, the landing page is serving as a path connecting the brand’s top of funnel stages like social media content marketing, and mid funnel techniques like email marketing. Due to their ability to be cross promoted across top of funnel channels, and to include lead capture tools like contact forms, landing pages are one of the most versatile types of mid funnel marketing content.
The more links you create between your marketing funnel stages through cross promotion, the more seamlessly leads can move from one piece of content to the next, and one funnel stage to the next.
Check out this blog post on marketing funnel stages for more info.
Retargeting is a technique where brands specifically target a lead that has shown interest in a product or service, but has yet to make a purchase.
This typically takes place at the mid or bottom stages of the marketing funnel where the lead has already advanced past general awareness of a brand, and has moved on to education and consideration of its products.
The premise behind retargeting is that because a lead is already familiar with your brand and has taken some action to indicate product interest (ex. Viewed a product landing page on your website, put an item in their shopping cart on your ecommerce store, etc.), that lead is worth targeting specifically because it has an increased chance of converting. This means it is worth an investment of time, budget, or both to deliver some marketing content to them to try and advance them further down the funnel to a conversion.
Common Examples of Retargeting Triggers
The first component of a retargeting strategy is setting up triggers that indicate when a lead has entered into your retargeting campaign. These triggers start a sequence of events that lead to the target lead receiving some sort of marketing communication from your company designed to rejuvenate their interest in your products.
Common Examples of Retargeting Marketing Techniques
Now that we’ve covered the triggers brands use to determine which leads enter into their retargeting campaigns, the next step in a retargeting strategy is to determine which marketing or advertising technique to use in order to reach back out to that lead and “retarget” them to push for a conversion.
Email marketing is a strategy that typically serves as the glue for a marketing funnel. This is because of the fact that it requires leads to provide a deeper level of contact information (their email address), and it gives brands the ability to strategically target leads at different funnel stages with content designed to move them to another stage.
While most commonly deployed at the mid funnel stage after someone has indicated awareness and interest in a brand by signing up for something (and giving their email address), it can also be deployed at the top of funnel through a general brand awareness newsletter, and at the bottom of the funnel for lead retargeting, as explained above.
Ways to Deploy Email Marketing at Each of the Marketing Funnel Stages
The point of sale or conversion is where your hard work on other marketing funnel stages pays off. This is where you capture customer information to engage in sales conversations, or convert customers to a purchase. In order to create bottom of funnel strategies that convert leads, it is critical to invest in tools that allow you to capture leads and convert them.
Lead Capture
For B2B businesses, email lead capture is a critical component of marketing and sales strategies. Capturing a lead’s email allows the marketing team to target them with various campaigns (ex. The email campaigns outlined above), and it gives the sales team the opportunity to reach out and engage the lead.
Investing in an email marketing tool that has a contact form feature is the marketing infrastructure B2B companies should put in place at the bottom of their funnel to capture and engage leads. Platforms like MailChimp and Constant Contact allow organizations to embed contact forms on website landing pages and in blog posts, or to create gated whitepapers and videos that capture people’s email addresses. CRMs like HubSpot have the same features, and also enable companies to structure their marketing and sales stages to strategically move leads down the funnel.
Ecommerce
For ecommerce brands, your ecommerce store represents the home base for your business, and the foundation of your bottom of funnel. This is where leads convert, and where top and mid funnel marketing tactics aim to drive leads toward.
Investing in an ecommerce platform like Shopify will allow you to set up an online store to list your products and take payments from customers. These platforms also feature marketing tools and integrations so that they seamlessly plug into other components of your marketing funnel. Examples of this include email marketing, social media integration for publishing news about new products on social channels, and digital ad features for retargeting campaigns.
Analytics will help to determine which strategies are helping the most to drive leads from one funnel stage to another. For example, top of funnel analytics like social media engagement and referral traffic, or blog post performance will reveal how much those channels are contributing to more exposure for your mid and bottom of funnel marketing materials.
White paper downloads and email campaign engagement are examples of mid funnel marketing analytics that will indicate how much qualified leads are interacting with your educational content.
Aside from conversions and purchases, which represent the most important bottom of funnel marketing analytics, data like product page views, contact form completions, and ecommerce shopping cart performance are all examples of metrics you can measure to observe lead activity toward the bottom of the funnel.
By leveraging analytics at each marketing funnel stage, you can make assumptions about which of your funnel stages is strongest, as well as which stage is weakest and needs work. For example, if your top of funnel marketing strategies like blog posts and social media are performing well and driving a large volume of traffic to your website landing pages (mid funnel), but your website analytics show a high bounce rate and low conversions on those pages, that’s a good indication that you should invest more time to improve the quality of the marketing messaging and assets on those pages.
Analytics Tools for Marketing Funnel Insights
Use Analytics to Identify Marketing Funnel Weak Points
The analytics discussed above will enable you to gain insights on which aspects of your marketing funnel are strengths and weaknesses. For example, if your website analytics tell you that your top of funnel marketing tactics are driving in a high volume of website traffic, you have a high volume of potential leads filling out your contact forms, but you have a comparatively low number of actual sales conversions, that indicates that your mid funnel and bottom of funnel strategies aren’t working.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, if your ecommerce store is converting a high percentage of inbound traffic into sales, it would be wise to invest in top of funnel marketing in order to continue feeding your middle of top of funnel stages that are converting.
By implementing strategies that connect your marketing funnel stages and help each of them work together, you can create a funnel that educates leads and converts. Follow these tips to build your own digital marketing funnel and to optimize each stage.
Want more information on building a marketing funnel? Check out Brand Credential's marketing funnel guide.
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